Valentin Khrushch

Valentin Khrusch was one of the central figures of non-conformist and underground art in Odessa, and later Moscow, emerging in the 1960s and 1970s. He was a major organizer of the so-called “open air” exhibitions that hung, sometimes only for hours, on fences along the street and later was the central catalyst in Odessa and Moscow behind the “apartment exhibitions”, shows of unofficial artists that took place in people’s homes. His works, which move seamlessly between figuration and abstraction, are enormously important to the history of Russian contemporary art, but due to their “unofficial” status, he remained better known in Ukraine and Russia than in the West, although there are major holdings of his works in a few American museums and private collections concerned with non-conformist art. He has been widely exhibited and collected in the countries where he worked, and has exhibited in Paris at UNESCO.